


Keep Calm and Blame Evolution

by manic_intent



Category: Mass Effect, Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, M/M, Spoilers for all ME games
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all started when Joker somehow managed to hit something during a standard mass relay hop between the Exodus Cluster and the Citadel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This was born out of a vague mash-up of ideas from long twitter conversations after a bunch of Loki fans found the Asgard system. And a planet called Loki. Since I subjected my poor readers to (yet another) massively long slow burn romance thing in the last fic that I did, here's an established relationship fic. I guess eventually it would progress to a Thor/Loki. Maybe. Hopefully I won't add in all the Avengers. :/ 
> 
> Speculation indicates that probably only a handful of my Usual Suspect readers will read this. XD;; Enjoy?

I.

It all started when Joker somehow managed to hit something during a standard mass relay hop between the Exodus Cluster and the Citadel.

Somehow.

For a seemingly harmless, disabled pilot, in Shepard's experience, many incidents that eventually went balls up actually tended to start with Joker. Certain incidents involving Purgatory, drinks called (aptly, as it were) Krogan Fucking Sunshine and bar tables being redacted cases in point. 

The Normandy shuddered on impact, shaking Traynor from her feet with a yelp and splaying unsuspecting crew over consoles and harnesses; from the cockpit, Joker let out a honest-to-gods scream even as Shepard grabbed wildly for the rail of the bridge and nearly fell face first into the galaxy holo. A klaxon alarm wailed as the ship pinwheeled, shaken out of the streaming silver lightshow of the mass relay corridor and out into unknown space-

" _EDI!_ ," Shepard snapped over the frantic shouts of the bridge crew, righting himself. "Joker. Status."

"Uh. You might want to come and look at this, Commander," Joker noted, his tone a strange mixture of both nervousness and astonishment. 

Shepard helped Traynor to her feet, and at a quick, sharp glance, the bridge crew hastily turned their eyes back to their consoles. It took a few quick strides to get to the cockpit, and at the sight of what floated in dark space just beyond it... well. Shepard had seen far too fucking much of insanity in his life, but this wasn't _possible_.

A human male body floated just a few feet away from the ship, cruising at the same speed from the momentum of their exit, in _space_ , his eyes closed, dressed in strange clothes - a dark vest with elaborately tooled, large silver discs spaced down a powerful torso, a wide belt over narrow hips, breeches and boots. The man had shoulder-length golden hair that floated in a wide halo around his face, and to all appearances looked like a character straight out of a period vid.

"What the fuck," Shepard murmured slowly, blinking.

"You're telling _me_." Joker's fingers were flying over the console, scanning and discarding diagrams and readouts. "That poor bastard should just be a bloody smear at the speed we were going. Instead, he punched through _our_ shields." 

"Hull integrity at ninety-one point eight per cent," EDI agreed, with unnatural calm. "Scanning system. We are in the Annos Basin. I suggest that we continue onwards to the Citadel for emergency repairs." 

"At least we got knocked out someplace with a mass relay," Shepard rubbed his palm over his face. "All right. We're going to retrieve that body. Figure out why it survived an impact with a bloody frigate in the middle of mass relay transit. Maybe give it a decent burial somewhere. Cortez-"

" _Commander!_ "

In different circumstances, Shepard would have greedily hoarded and treasured the memory of Joker squealing like a three-year-old girl, maybe trotted it out for a little dusting whenever Joke was drinking water or something, but now, Commander James Shepard, reinstated Council Spectre and Final Hope of the Godsdamned Galaxy, could only dig his fingers into Joker's seat and gape in astonishment.

The man had opened his eyes. And instead of immediately asphyxiating or panicking, he was frowning at them, blinking as though trying to clear his head. He stared at them.

They stared back.

EDI waved.

"EDI," Joker hissed. "Don't attract his attention."

"Statistics indicate that a sideways hand gesture is a customary friendly human greeting." 

"That thing survived a direct collision with the Normandy and came out on top. He doesn't need to breathe. _He's not human!_ "

The 'man' blinked at them again, owlishly, then he waved back.

"Fire everything?" Joker suggested hopefully, shoulders pressed flat against the seat.

Tempting. "Get him on board."

"I knew that you were going to say that, Commander," Joker muttered sourly.

Whatever it - he - was, the man endured decontamination procedures with a strange, slightly condescending air of amused patience, seemingly unfazed by the number of heavily armed personnel watching from the shuttle bay perimeter. Garrus, in particular, was pointedly fingering the barrel of his Black Widow, Liara's hands glowed in faint pulses, Kaidan was shifting his weight endlessly from foot to foot, and Shepard was having to carefully resist the urge to reach for his own rifle. Only Tali seemed to emanate a purely non-hostile curiosity, occasionally going up on her toes to get a better view over a grim-faced James' shoulder, a clear indication of her level of survival instincts or lack thereof, in Shepard's opinion.

Eventually, the decontamination crew stepped away from the man-alien-impossibility, and he nodded companionably at them before striding forward, oblivious to the way a small forest of various firearms instantly tipped up to face him.

"You are the master of this vessel?" The man addressed him, his consonants oddly slewed and harsh, but in surprisingly passable N7-English.

"You're _human?_ " Shepard asked, incredulous. 

The man grinned broadly, every line of him etched in unnaturally ebullient good-humour for someone who had just had a head-on collision with a ship in a mass relay corridor. "No. I am Asgardian. My name is Thor."

"Extranet records indicate from a preliminary keyword search that 'Thor', full designate 'Thor Odinson', is an ancient human Norse God of Thunder," EDI announced helpfully, after a tense pause. "Residing in a variant of Heaven known as Asgard."

"So Gods exist?" Kaiden snapped his gaze over to EDI. "And we ran over one of them? This could only happen to you, Shepard."

"Life's always unexpected around you," Garrus agreed dryly. "Commander." Traitor.

"Does this mean that all Gods exist?" Liara asked, excited. "Including those of the asari?"

" _Everyone settle down_ ," Shepard cut in sharply, and as the babble of questions ebbed, added, "We are, uh, sorry about the accident. Sir." If it turned out that he'd just overturned over a century or so of secularism via headlong collision, it didn't hurt to start off polite.

Anderson would be proud.

"No harm was done," Thor shrugged his massive shoulders. "I hope that I have not caused any undue alarm."

"Much undue alarm has already been caused," Shepard noted, with a glare at Kaidan as the other Spectre opened his mouth. Kaidan closed it, although an injured expression slunk over his face. "We'll need to head to the Citadel for repairs. You could probably catch a ship back to the Asgard system..." Shepard trailed off, awkwardly. Thor - if it was really a God - had been last seen travelling through the mass relay corridor _without_ a ship, after all. Maybe he didn't _need_ one.

The thought was both singularly terrifying and extraordinary. If the Gods existed, then perhaps the battle against the Reapers could be simpler than Shepard could ever have thought.

"That would not be necessary," Thor grimaced. "I have been banished from Asgard."

"You were kicked out of the house and into a mass _relay_? Damn. And I thought that my family had dramatic disagreements," James breathed.

"All right, crew, back to your stations," Shepard rubbed at his temples. He could feel a headache coming on. "EDI, try and patch in Admiral Hackett. In the meantime, Mister, er, Odinson, please follow me up to the war room."

II.

As it turned out, Thor was not in fact technically a God, sort of, and the Asgardians were a highly advanced, possibly immortal, but reclusive race that may or may not have jump-started human evolution, thousands of years ago, with a few biological experiments, which explained the uncanny structural resemblance. Apparently the Asgardians were in the habit of checking in on Earth, every so often, presumably when bored, leaving various creation myths in their wake like unwanted babies, and then they had left Earth to its own devices when humanity grew enough brain matter to think that murdering each other in large scales was an indicator of an advanced civilisation.

It was all pretty damned hard to believe, and if not for the matter of the minor hull breach on his beloved ship, Shepard would have happily tossed Thor back through the airlock for breaching the universe's unspoken Don't Fuck with Shepard rule. Though apparently that was not so much because Thor was categorically invulnerable but because the Asgardians had developed some sort of advanced personal shielding technology for mass relay travel. Thor had also no real idea why an unprecedented collision had happened in the first place - for all that Shepard knew, maybe Odin had been aiming for the Normandy. Bastard.

Unfortunately, what could have been a major breakthrough for the galaxy's war against the Reapers in general turned out to be a false start after all - Shepard should have known that whenever life dropped an apparent gift into his lap, it was just waiting for him to let down his guard so that it could sucker punch him in the face with a fistful of false hope.

"... what do you mean, you can't?" Hackett had been arguing in circles with Thor for over twenty minutes and counting. "Surely you have coordinates, at the least."

"I have been exiled from Asgard," Thor pointed out, again with his unnatural patience. "And I do not have 'coordinates', even were I welcome. We navigate the worlds through the Bifrost." Thor had been shown a star map of the Asgard System, and although the 'stars looked familiar', he seemed certain that his home did not in fact exist on any of the known planets, although he also appeared equally amused at the planets' given human names.

This meant either that an _entire planet_ was somehow cloaked and invisible to intergalactic traffic and cartography, or Asgard existed on some other, unknown system beyond the usual mass relays. Both possibilities were equally sobering.

"We need your people's help, Thor," Hackett was desperate enough that he couldn't hide the edge of pleading to his tone even if he tried. "If your species is as technologically advanced as you're implying, we need it. The galaxy is at war. The Reapers will come for your people as well."

"The Reapers have come and gone before," Thor noted dismissively, just when Shepard formed the vague thought that maybe, just maybe, the world had thrown enough punches for today. "It is part of the Ragnarok Cycle. The worlds are cleansed. New life re-emerges, and the cycle begins again, to wind another fifty thousand years."

"Your people have _survived_ the Reapers?" Hackett demanded.

"No. No one does," Thor replied placidly, though he smiled as he said so, possibly indicating that the impact with the Normandy had done more damage than was immediately obvious. "But the battles until the end will be glorious."

"Except that you've been exiled, and I don't see your magic hammer anywhere." Shepard gave silent thanks to EDI and efficient information uploading. 

Thor's face fell, giving Shepard the distinct impression of having kicked a puppy. An immortal, immensely powerful puppy. "Yes. It has been a setback. But," he added, brightening up visibly again, "It appears that I have had the great fortune to fall amongst new friends."

Hackett exchanged a pointed glance with Shepard, who lifted his left shoulder in a faint shrug. It wasn't _his_ fault that the technologically advanced new alien race seemed so weirdly trusting. Unless it had a concussion. "Liara and Doctor Chakwas would probably need to examine him," Shepard added cautiously, and Hackett frowned, the increasingly etched lines over his brow deepening.

"Take him to the Citadel. The Council should be made aware of this new... development." Hackett sighed. "I can't help but add that this has been rather disappointing, Mister Odinson. The discovery of an immortal race, one that was part of ancient human creation myths-"

"No race that the Reapers come for will survive them," Thor interrupted, as gently as before. "We accept that. We have always rebuilt."

"But you've said that you fight. That there are 'battles' before the end. Don't you ever try to _win_?" Shepard demanded.

"The cycle exists for a reason," Thor shrugged. "We fight, but we know that we will die."

"Maybe they don't have the capabilities to take down the Reapers after all," Shepard told Hackett, painfully disappointed. "I guess it's back to Plan A."

"Work on the Crucible is progressing," Hackett exhaled heavily. "But I can't help ruling out this possibility. If Mister Odinson becomes more cooperative about the location of his home, perhaps you should pay them a visit. After all, you've resolved more than one set of ingrained interracial tensions. Resolving a paternal dispute should not be so difficult. And we're going to need all the help that we can get."

"Acknowledged, sir." Shepard saluted.

"Hackett out." 

Thor watched curiously as the hologram flickered into blank space, that strange expression of amused condescension creeping over his face again, as though the alien was looking at a quaint form of outdated technology. When he caught Shepard staring at him, Thor grinned broadly. "This is all rather curious."

"You're taking exile very well," Shepard told him sourly. 

Thor chuckled, shaking his head. "I am the next in line to the throne of Asgard. I doubt that it will be permanent."

"You're next in line to a throne that won't be there for very much longer, if you don't help us fight." Shepard pointed out hopefully.

Thor, however, merely grinned again. "Of that I am aware, Commander." At Shepard's scowl, he added, "There have been many cycles. Many Thors. Many Allfathers. In previous cycles we learned how to restart ours. We are, after all, very long lived."

"How does that even remotely work?" Shepard asked, intrigued. "So you guys just... reload, every fifty thousand years? Restart? Like software?"

"Unfortunately," Thor noted apologetically, "I am not aware of the details of the process. You will have to ask my mother."

"That's if you even remembered the way back home," Shepard grumbled. "We'll find you some quarters and some clothes. And you'd better report to the med-bay for a check up." Gods knew what Chakwas was going to find out in the name of science, but in the shuttle bay, Chakwas had looked as though all her birthdays had come all at once.

Not that Shepard could blame her. If not for Garrus - well, Thor was definitely very, very easy on the eyes, and he was fairly sure that he had seen Cortez surreptitiously checking out Thor's ass while checking on the shuttle. Not that Thor had seemed to notice. Maybe immortal God-aliens were asexual. It would explain the seemingly total disinterest in their incipient annihilation. 

"If you could locate Mjolnir," Thor added, almost as an afterthought, as they went through the security scan towards the bridge, "I would be happy to accompany you on your journeys until my exile is revoked. As a gesture of gratitude."

"You mentioned about previous cycles - so you remember fighting the Reapers?"

"We have no actual memory of our previous cycles, only what we read from the records that we keep," Thor noted, then added, more brightly. "But I would like to take my measure against one."

Great. Well. Enthusiasm probably counted for _something_ , right? Shepard briefly entertained a vaguely alarming vision of having to explain to a wrathful, technologically advanced alien whom ancient humans had once worshipped as the Allfather as to why his son had gotten himself fried by a Reaper, and grimaced. "Traynor, put a galaxy-wide alert on... a hammer? Is it special? Does it glow?"

"It would be immovable to anyone by myself, wherever it has fallen. There would be runes upon it."

"An immovable, runed hammer." Because this was his life right now, apparently. "Joker, set course to the Citadel." For once, it was going to be a relief to dump this in the Council's lap.

III.

Garrus was typically unsympathetic afterwards, when Shepard slunk into the main battery during the now hopefully uneventful relay jump and sprawled into the turian's cot. "You do after all have a habit of accepting strange aliens onto your ship."

Shepard was rubbing at the bridge of his nose, always a futile gesture. Turians were seemingly immune to melodrama, and Garrus' military upbringing meant that calibrations to the main battery during duty hours always took precedence over anything personal. "Name one."

"Grunt?"

"Krogans aren't strange aliens. Trigger-happy, sure, but-"

"He was tank-grown. That's strange." Garrus' tone was pointedly distracted, but Shepard refused to move. "The singing ex-STG salarian? The quarian who named her combat drone? I've caught her talking to it, you know. When she thinks that no one's watching. The Shadow Broker asari? The, hm, refreshingly, almost psychopathically single-minded justicar asari? And don't even get me started on the humans."

"What's wrong with us?" Shepard asked, morbidly fascinated despite himself. 

"Let's just say that if Lieutenant Vega offers you anything that he's cooked, you might want to take a DNA sample of it first and get EDI to scan it for matches." At Shepard's expression of horror, Garrus made the low, huffing sound of a turian's version of evil laughter. "Relax. No one's died so far from ingesting his concoctions. Besides, I've heard that most things taste like 'chicken' to you humans. Your taste buds must be quite primitive."

"You don't," Shepard observed, before he could help himself, and Garrus actually glanced up briefly from the console, before snorting and looking back down at the scrolling data on the vid screen.

"Yes. And then there's you. You're allergic to me, but you do seem to have a wide streak of masochism."

"It's usually worth it." At least at the beginning. Chakwas had even stopped bothering with the lectures.

Garrus didn't even bother to look up at that. "We're running a little low on medical supplies. Also, we're both still on duty. Later, Shepard."

Trust a turian to have priorities. "You're not wondering about how a supposedly highly advanced species has kept itself secret all this while? Despite apparently having conducted possibly invasive procedures or experiments on ancient humans?"

"That's another problem with you humans," Garrus noted mildly, "Your heads are filled with far too many questions. Military hierarchies are much simpler. This would be a General or Primarch level question. Since neither are in range, it's a Commander Shepard question."

"Thanks," Shepard said dryly, scowling at the ceiling.

"What's Thor doing now?" Garrus asked after a long pause, clearly out of a token attempt to appear interested, possibly such that Shepard would leave him alone to his _fascinating_ attempts to make the ship's armaments point two per cent more efficient, or whatever it was.

"Consuming vast quantities of the ship's food supply." Mythology had been right about Thor's appetite. And, possibly, his level of intelligence. Thor seemed to treat the world around him with an unrelentingly friendly curiosity; Shepard didn't quite remember the last time he had met anyone so openly good-natured. If _he_ had been alive for fifty thousand years, Shepard was fairly sure that he would be a bleak cynic by the end of it all. Potentially suicidal, at that.

"Good. At least he's occupied."

"Up until the rest of us starve." 

"If he needs alternative food sources, I suppose he'll probably be allergic to Tali and myself, as well. So we'll be safe." 

"Not funny, Garrus."

"I wasn't joking."

"Right," Shepard muttered, depressed all over again, "I think I'm in the right frame of mind to get back to the bridge now." 

"Glad to be of assistance." When Shepard rolled to his feet and started for the exit, however, Garrus reached over to carefully hook him over, talons a gentle pressure on Shepard's flank. "You already have enough on your plate, Shepard. Thor seems friendly, and he won't be your problem for very much longer. Stop worrying."

"Keep calm, and pass it up the chain of command?"

"That's the turian way," Garrus observed, though he tilted his head, mandibles parting slightly, when Shepard stroked gloved fingers under the horned crest, to the softer scales beneath, the way he'd been shown. It wasn't entirely surprising, on hindsight, that gestures of affection for such a military race tended to involve access to the few, vulnerable stretches of skin that weren't covered by carapace. "Commander."

"Later, I know." Shepard let his hand drop, although he straightened up when Garrus drew his talons lightly up his back, over his spine, the bloody tease. 

"Try to keep your crew from getting eaten," Garrus turned back to the console. "Vega still owes me five hundred credits."

"No promises."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exile was _awesome_.

I.

Being exiled somehow managed to be the most entertaining thing that had happened to Thor in _centuries_. 

He'd been around the universe before, particularly Earth, but that had been a very long time ago, when the soft, bipedal creatures that the Asgardians had accidentally made in their image still huddled together in wooden huts and hunted animals with primitive weaponry. It had amused him for a while to be worshipped as a God, and then it had just become awkward when the humans had developed tendencies towards ritual sacrifice, and when Odin had forbidden any further contact with Earth, it had been somewhat of a relief. 

The humans were more advanced now, but they were still young yet in terms of the galaxy, and Thor had to admit that it was rather a waste, for them to be crushed now by the turn of the Cycle when they had yet reached their prime. He liked them best, liked their passion and their unpredictability where his mother preferred the asari, his father the turians, and his brother the salarians. But he could not save them, even if he could. The Cycle always wound on, unbroken.

The captain of the human-turian space-faring craft, Shepard, seemed openly relieved when they docked at Naglfar. Thor had come to the ancient vessel, once, before the _maðr_ had populated it and named it home, and its once skeletally bleak, spreading arms were now dotted with lights and lush terraformed plants.

"You look like you've been here before," Shepard observed, as they were waved through a small corridor, blue grids of light sweeping up and over their skin. Short-lived as the humans were, Thor noted, they were still sharp.

"Naglfar was not like this when I was here last," Thor agreed, as they walked out into some sort of crowded holding zone, his outfit drawing curious glances from all of the _maðr_ that they passed. "It was cold and dark. I think now perhaps that it was waiting."

"'Naglfar'? Ah. You have your own name for the Citadel." Shepard tilted his head, as though listening to a voice that Thor could not hear - likely the AI named EDI - and added, arching his eyebrows, "Your kind think that this place is made out of _fingernails_?"

Thor chuckled. "Your ancestors formed many theories about the Æsir, friend Shepard. Naglfar is no more made of human waste than your craft."

"I guess that's a relief." Shepard muttered, as they stepped into a small chamber, lit along the ground, walls and ceiling with lights. "Citadel tower." 

"Spectre status recognised. Welcome, Commander Shepard," a disembodied, feminine voice stated from around them, and the doors whispered shut.

"Don't your people have lifts?" Shepard asked, as Thor peered around them with interest once he heard the faint, displaced hum of air shifting around the 'room' - they were being lifted upwards, he noted, fast as flight.

"They are not required," Thor replied, distracted. The Æsir were immortal, after all. Time was a resource that they usually had in abundance, and stairways were more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. 

Shepard looked impressed. "You can fly?"

"Not without Mjolnir." 

"Ah. The magic hammer." Shepard grimaced. "And I suppose that you can't call lightning without it."

"No," Thor drew out his palms. "For the most part, I will be like one of you until it is returned to me. When Father cast me out," Thor added, with a sigh, "He locked much of my power into Mjolnir." He had felt the loss of his powers as keenly as he would a severed limb; the agony at disjunction had been _intense_.

Shepard looked as though he was going to comment, but the lift door pinged open, revealing a domed conclave, resplendent with banked rows of rich, pink-purple foliage, the air scented with faint perfumes from the thick blossoms draped across gnarled branches. Sections of the conclave were blackened and ruined, as though from recent attacks, spattered with burn marks and stains, and the entire compound was thick with turian guards. Shepard nodded at a handful of them as they passed, heading purposefully towards the anterooms.

Stairs led up to some sort of audience chamber with a raised dais; upon it stood a turian, a salarian and an asari. They stood clustered, as though a fourth space was habitually filled - it now stood empty, to the turian's right.

"Commander Shepard," the asari acknowledged them. "We received Admiral Hackett's recommendation."

"I'm just here to make the delivery," Shepard gestured at Thor. "So-"

"And we have come to a conclusion," the salarian continued, as though Shepard hadn't spoken. "The human that you call Thor is to remain in your custody, Spectre."

Shepard blinked. "He's not _human_."

"Preliminary blood tests and x-rays from Doctor Chakwas of the Normandy indicate otherwise," the asari disagreed. "And the story that Admiral Hackett has forwarded to us seems patently unbelievable."

"Rather," the turian noted, "Instead of belonging to some sort of unknown, advanced alien species that looks and is structurally near identical to humans, we posit instead that Thor _is_ human. Likely, a descendant perhaps from one of your lost colonies. We understand from human data that your first colonial forays into space were not all accounted for. Perhaps one of them had an incident in an experimental mass relay jump and-" 

"And somehow managed to develop personal mass relay transit technology in all this time?" Shepard demanded, incredulous. 

"It would be rather more believable than your story of Gods and magical hammers, Commander Shepard," the salarian said acerbically. "And - no offence intended - but certain cultures do tend to... eject the mentally unsound."

"Into _outer space_?" 

"We used to shoot ours," the turian observed absently, and when the asari glanced at him sharply, added, "Centuries ago."

"Ancient barbaric customs aside," the asari said with distaste, "I have to concur. Your friend likely needs psychological help that is not in our capacity or responsibility to provide."

Thor could endure no more. "First you accuse me of lying," he growled slowly, his hands bunching into fists, "And now you lay insult to the state of my mind?"

Shepard went from standing at attention to being at his side with a hand gripped tight around his wrist in a second. "Thor-"

Thor ignored him, taking a step forward, jerking Shepard into stumbling as he did so; humans weighed nothing to him. "I walked each of your worlds before your people knew language, _maðr_ ; I watched your suns sink over your peaks when your mountains were yet young. I will _not_ suffer to stand here and be _belittled_."

The salarian had stepped back, in alarm, and belatedly, Thor noticed the turian guards in the audience chamber raising their weapons. He doubted that the guns would have a fatal effect on him, but a battle in such enclosed surroundings could cause accidents to occur, and he did not mean the _maðr_ any true harm, however deluded they were - he could sense that they were old, for each of their kind, and they were unarmed. It would be dishonourable.

"Commander Shepard," the turian instructed warily, "Remove your associate from the Tower. This is a human matter, and is none of the Council's concern. Dismissed."

"Affirmative," Shepard grit out, his eyes narrowed in anger, and he gingerly let go of Thor's wrist. "Odinson, we're leaving."

Thor hesitated only for a moment. There was no real point in provoking battle, at least not in such circumstances, and his friend Shepard looked upset. For the Commander's sake, Thor nodded slowly, and followed, ignoring the way the turian guards stiffened as they passed.

Shepard let out of an explosive sigh only when they were back in the lift, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "Well. That went over fucking _fantastically_. I don't think that we could have done any better if we had, oh, _set the damned place on fire_."

Thor thought this over. "You of the _maðr_ are all highly flammable, if I recall. Except the hanar, perhaps."

"That was a joke. A _joke_ ," Shepard stressed, jaw clenched. "I don't even know why I thought that the Council would be helpful. I think I forgot my usual serve of cynicism when I was having my breakfast this morning. In the meantime, I'm going to need someone to look after you while I check the ship repairs." 

"I would not mind exploring Naglfar," Thor admitted, his anger already fading, replaced by curiosity.

"Good." Shepard pressed his fingers to his earpiece. "Kaidan, this is Shepard. Where are you? Presidium Commons? Right. Stay there. You're on babysitting duty... yeah. Didn't go well. I need to check on the Normandy's repairs... why? Because you're the only other human Spectre... fuck you too, Alenko." Shepard dropped his fingers. "Presidium Commons."

"Affirmative, Commander Shepard," the disembodied voice spoke.

The human named Kaidan Alenko looked tense when Shepard led Thor over to the platform overlooking the lush spread of garden that seemed to form the central spine of Naglfar, and Thor took a seat at his table with a reassuring smile when Shepard muttered something into Alenko's ear, nodded curtly at Thor, and stalked away, leaving them mired in an awkward silence.

"So," Alenko said uncertainly. "Uh. Nice day. Isn't it."

"It is a good day for battle," Thor agreed. The artificial light in Naglfar was warm and pleasant.

Alenko choked briefly on whatever he was drinking, and coughed. "Yeah, well, Shepard said that I was to keep an eye on you, so no fighting. I guess I'll give you the tour, or... what do you like to do? Other than fight?"

"Drink and make merry?" Thor suggested, after some thought.

"We can do that." Alenko visibly brightened up. "We can definitely do that. This might be easier than I thought."

II.

Thor was carefully shifting the groaning lump that was Major Kaidan Alenko into a comfortable fetal position on the bunk of the holding cell when a pair of turians showed a furiously scowling Commander Shepard to the corridor outside the stasis field. Shepard nodded at them, and the turians backed away out of sight.

"Kaidan, I told you to keep him out of trouble," Shepard snapped. "Instead, I have a citation here for... thirty-five counts of assault and battery, public disturbance, sixteen counts of property damage and two counts of minor arson, all in one afternoon?"

Alenko's only response was another groan, so it was left to Thor to speak in his honour. "Friend Alenko is a mighty warrior. Unfortunately, he does not have the belly for drink."

"All right, start from the beginning," Shepard muttered. "What happened?"

"We set forth for the drinking house known as Purgatory," Thor recalled. "Friend Alenko introduced me to other humans and we had a drinking competition. Then there was an altercation at the bar and I was honour-bound to intervene."

"From this report," Shepard had a holo pad in his hand, and he was scrolling through glowing lines of orange text, "You decked the bouncers, various off-duty soldiers who decided to get involved in the brawl, and then the first squad of C-Sec officers who came down to break up the 'altercation', and they had to shoot you full of tranquilizers before you could be arrested. Kaidan, I'm disappointed. You're lucky that the Council didn't revoke your Spectre status."

There was another hoarse groan, which sounded, possibly, like 'fuck you, Shepard', and Alenko pointedly tried to pull his collar up over his ears. 

"Hackett's calling in some favours to get the charges dropped," Shepard glowered at his fellow human. "The both of you should be released into my 'custody' in a few hours or so. You're both confined to the Normandy until further notice. I'll try to get extra food supplies."

"Very well." That was a pity - Thor would have liked to explore Naglfar a little more.

"Even if you're not who you say you are," Shepard grumbled, rubbing a gloved palm over his face, "At least you're one hell of a fighter. You'll be a welcome addition to the crew - assuming you don't eat us out of our stores."

"I can limit myself if necessary." Sustenance wasn't really required at that volume - Thor had mainly been curious about modern _maðr_ forms of sustenance. The flavors were complex. "The skalds will sing epic _drápa_ about our adventures, friends Shepard and Alenko."

Alenko groaned again, and Shepard snorted. "Until you find your hammer, you're going to have to prove to me that you can shoot a gun before I can in all conscience bring you out into the field, Odinson. Try not to get into any more trouble in the meantime, all right? I'm already fucking swamped by Spectre and Alliance business up to my ears."

"Very well," Thor tried a reassuring smile, but Shepard only returned him a wan expression before he left. 

A warrior and an honourable one, Thor felt, rather pleased to have accidentally made Shepard's acquaintance. And Alenko's. Even if the latter couldn't quite seem to hold his drink.

"Somebody just kill me," Alenko muttered, as if to belabour the point.

"But it is a fine day for battle," Thor pointed out heartily. "And self-harm never achieves anything, friend Alenko."

Alenko moaned. "I'm never going to drink again."

The major didn't seem much improved by the time the turian guards came over again, accompanied by a smirking Lieutenant Vega, and allowed Thor to half-drag, half-carry Alenko back to the Normandy and back to his quarters on the crew deck.

"I'm missing out on my shore leave for this," Vega drawled, though he was still smirking when Thor poured Alenko into his bunk. "Can't hold your drink, Alenko?"

"Fuck you, Vega," Alenko muttered hoarsely, pulling his pillow over his face. "Next time _you_ babysit the Norse God. Leave me alone to die."

"Damn, you're worse than a little girl, Major. Besides, I _am_ on babysitting duty now. No thanks to you," Vega grinned evilly, and he glanced over to Thor. "Hey. You know how to play cards?"

An hour and few hands later, Vega admitted defeat. " _Damn_! You're good. And I've only _just_ taught you the rules!"

"This is a variant of a game that I've played in Asgard," Thor admitted, as he laid down his hand. "My brother took delight in beating everyone at it. I've tried to learn to hold my own." Not that he ever could, against Loki, but he had a fair track record against the Warriors Three.

Mentioning that sobered him, as he looked back down at the cards. The Asgardian variant had far more cards than the _maðr_ version, and more complex rules, and both involved memory work and guile. Thor was never particularly good at the latter, but neither was Vega or the other members of the skeleton crew roped into the game; at least, not compared to Loki or Sif.

Thinking of Loki and the Warriors Three made Thor acutely homesick for the first time since his exile. He missed the graceful spires of Asgard, the sprawling vistas, the veldts and the expanse of Yggdrasil with an ache so fierce that it was near physical. He missed home. He missed his friends, his parents. 

He missed his _brother_.

"You all right there, Odinson?" Vega asked, concerned, as he shuffled the cards, the other crew members drifting away.

"I have not been away from Asgard for so long before," Thor confessed wryly. "Not by myself." On all of his adventures out of Asgard, he had always been accompanied either by Loki, or members of the Warriors Three, or all of his friends. He wasn't exactly lonely now - he was surrounded by new companions, after all - but the lack of anything familiar was... confronting. Unsettling.

He missed Mjolnir's weight at his hip.

"I don't know about you guys," Vega noted, "But my family, hell we used to fight all the time. Once, I didn't speak to my sister for a _week_. And you know what? I don't even remember what we fought about. Family gets over these things, you know? It'll be all right."

Somehow, the human's simple faith was reassuring. "I suppose that it will be." 

"Good. No more long faces. Another game?"

"You already owe me..." Thor frowned for a moment, gave up, and added, "Many, many 'credits'."

"Got to give me a chance to win it back, yeah?"

III.

Thor was seated on a couch in the starboard observation deck, watching other space-faring craft of beautifully dissimilar shapes and sizes dock or leave port, when there was a faint disturbance in reality in the corner of his eye. Turning, he smiled in happy relief at the sight of his brother, dressed ever for authenticity in the close-fitting, unarmoured wear of a human - or at least, his illusion was. Skilful as Loki was at illusion, he could not quite smooth out every small imperfection to the eye of a practiced observer; the edges of his 'clothes' tended to clip almost imperceptibly into the furniture, and light never played perfectly over the folds of unfamiliar fabric.

"Brother. It is good to see you."

"And I you," Loki replied soberly.

"It has been almost a week. Is Father truly still angry?"

Loki's expression grew grim. "Father is dead, Thor. I came here to tell you. I am afraid that the stress of facing Laufey - and then banishing you - was too much for his old heart to bear."

Thor's smile faltered, all the quips and stories that he had been saving up for Loki's inevitable appearance sleeting blank in his mind. "Father is... Father is _dead_?"

"I am sorry, Thor." Loki twisted his fingers together, looking down into his lap. "I am King, now."

"I..." Grief and guilt made his throat clench shut, and his eyes stung until he took in a deep, shuddering breath, a wrenching ache choking him, twisting sharp and hot like knife-wounds, and he was dimly aware of the harsh sob that forced out through his throat. "I..."

"I am sorry," Loki repeated, his tone edged with something unfathomable, almost earnest, and Thor forced calm over himself.

"How is Mother?"

"She is... well, considering the circumstances. She has withdrawn to mourn."

Of course. "And now you are King."

"Yes." Loki glanced up, towards the view of a turian ship limping to dock. "I am King."

"I want to go home, brother," Thor said pleadingly. "You can revoke my exile now, can you not?"

"I cannot unmake the last act of the previous King with my first act as the new ruler of Asgard, Thor. No matter how much I want to do so."

"Then make it your second, or your third," Thor persisted, reaching over to grip Loki's wrist, forgetting himself - his fingers slipped through the illusion like smoke. Loki's form wavered, then solidified again when Thor pressed his hands tightly back over his own lap. "The Ragnarok Cycle is waning, Loki. Surely-"

"There are still... formalities. I am sorry." Loki finally looked up at him, thin-lipped. "I came here to say my goodbyes. To wish you well."

"Loki-"

"I will see you again," Loki added, inexorably, "When the Cycle turns once more." 

"It will be another life." 

"Then so it must." Loki reached over, to press an insubstantial palm over his cheek, painfully tender, though his dark eyes remained unfathomable. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye, brother." Thor echoed dumbly, blinking as his vision wavered wet, and by the time he rubbed his eyes, his brother was gone. 

His father was _dead_. 

Thor let out a long, ragged breath, and looked up towards the vast expanse of space beyond the arms of Naglfar, towards a home that he would never see again, lost in grief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's actually harder to write Thor's POV, somehow. D:


End file.
